


3 can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead

by iffiness



Series: fem!Tony stuff [5]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Female Tony Stark, Gen, Genderswap, Identity Porn, Implied/Referenced Torture, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Rule 63, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 11:36:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17263496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iffiness/pseuds/iffiness
Summary: Keeping Iron Man as a secret identity was obscenely easy.





	3 can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead

**Author's Note:**

> warning: noncon drug use, characters drugged and kidnapped, future vague refs to torture (maybe)
> 
> double warning: no promises on when or if next chapter is coming out so enjoy 
> 
> triple warning: i wrote this a long ass time ago so i am so sorry if anything seems to have some incongruity i just really love the secret identity trope

Keeping Iron Man as a secret identity was  _ obscenely _ easy. 

 

Of course, it helped that literally everyone took one look at the armor design and decided it had to be a man piloting it. For once in her life the downright sexist views she’d always had to fight through came in handy, as ironic as it was. That and the fact that old Nicky agreed that she should stay behind scenes meant that her identity was stupidly secure. A grand total of two people outside of her family group (JARVIS, the bots, Pepp, Rhodey, and Happy) even knew she was the one behind the suit of armor. 

 

Well,  _ three _ , but she couldn’t count Loki. As far as she’s concerned he can rot away in his Asgardian prison for eternity. And something about him just  _ screams _ that he would never tell Thor about her identity just to spite him, so really, she’s not worried about it. 

 

So, the combined efforts of Fury, Coulson, Pepper, and JARVIS ensured that she had literally nothing to worry about so long as she just… didn’t screw up. Or out herself. There’s good money on which is going to happen, even if they all deny there’s a betting pool at all. She’d be insulted if it wasn’t so true. A lot of times she’d debated with herself about just telling the team. Just ripping the helmet off after a battle and screaming at the reporters that it’s  _ her _ in the armor, not some random bodyguard. That Toni  _ fucking _ Stark was the mind  _ and _ body behind the armor. 

 

She never could come out with it though. There was just something too liberating about the anonymity. Something just… when people look at the armor they’re looking at a  _ hero _ . They’re looking at a man who flew a nuke into space and regularly risks his life for them all. It’s so wildly different from how people look at her. Toni Stark is a billionaire, regularly featured in tabloids as either a loose slut or a raging alcoholic and is just generally louted as being untouchable. Unreachable. The venerable party girl who’s never put in a hard day’s work in her life. Someone who is so far above them all in money, intelligence, and social standing that people just stopped trying. 

 

So really, who could blame her for keeping her identity under wraps? She’d always had an addictive personality and this? This was like the nectar of the gods. It was like the best cocaine she’d ever had. The smoothest whiskey. It was so wildly addictive to be wanted because she was good, because people like her and her personality (instead of her money or her body or just anything superficial), that it would have to be a big reason for her to ever out her own identity at this point. In fact, it was getting close to the point that JARVIS had to cajole her to get out of the suit at all when she was in the tower. She’d even spent time creating sensor nodes to call the armor to her, implanted subdermal, and was just enough on the side of obsession to always have the armor near her that she refused to tell anyone about them.

\---

The other Avengers had moved in quickly after the Loki shitfest, mostly at the behest of Fury and the promise of good food. It was an entirely new experience for Toni to be living with other people that weren’t Pepper or Rhodey. There wasn’t really a specific order in whose company she preferred outside the armor because generally she was left alone. Bruce was the Avenger she interacted with the most as Toni Stark, followed oddly enough by Clint and then Thor whenever he was on the planet. Natasha and Steve generally were around one another, and each of them were more than a little distant and professional with her.

 

Bruce was the obvious one. He enjoys science-ing, she enjoys science-ing, together they create beautiful science-ing babies. The good doctor and his alter ego both enjoy her company just as much as she enjoys theirs. It took awhile for Bruce to warm up to her and the idea of her friendship, but by her estimations she’d done a decent job. He no longer mumbled around her. He stopped saying sorry for everything he did. He started treating her like he would any other colleague instead of the very rich benefactor for the Avengers. They had a nice, friendly working relationship that she was desperately hoping to see bud into something more as time went on. She was still working on convincing him to unpack the bag he kept under his bed, but she wasn’t pushing it. Much. 

 

Clint was an unexpectedly quick semi-friend. It was late on a Tuesday night (maybe Wednesday morning?), Toni hadn’t really slept at all since probably Saturday, and that was her excuse for not noticing the archer sitting at the kitchen island nursing a beer when she stumbled in. She probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all—she was very intent on brewing her seventh cup of coffee—if he hadn’t come up beside her and literally unplugged the machine from the wall to stop it from brewing. Somehow that had turned from her righteous indignation to the crime he’d committed to them sharing an expensive whisky on the flight deck outside, discussing nightmares without  _ really _ discussing the details and lamenting on how they each could barely sleep. From there it’d quickly become something of a routine for them. Clint mostly kept his distance from her during the day, but she couldn’t find it in herself to blame him. Their late night vague confessions to one another left a sort of awkward chasm between them when the light could shine in on each of their faults. 

 

Thor, she discovered very quickly, had a thing for witty brunettes. She and Jane Foster had many conversations about the god of thunder in their emails back and forth, and while Toni could never see herself with him she could easily commiserate with Dr. Foster about his antics. It wasn’t even that he was overtly trying to hook up with her—on the contrary, he never once tried to be anything more than friends. He was actively just using her for his own entertainment if she had to wager a guess and came across as inordinately fond of her for someone who barely knew her. She didn’t mind it at all; he was fun, charming, and laughed at all of her jokes. But a part of her had to wonder if he wasn’t just seeing someone else when he was with her. Someone more mischievous than her. A hell of a lot trickier. Also, with dark hair. And magic. Not that she was gonna ask the big guy one way or the other if she reminded him of his brother, but it was the best guess she had for why he enjoyed her company. 

 

Steve and Natasha were the two she interacted with the least as Toni Stark. The others she saw at least a couple times a week, sometimes more, but the soldier and the spy? Very rarely. Nat she could almost understand—being sent to spy on her during the whole palladium incident probably left a negative view of Toni in her mind. But Steve? He was a mystery. They’d not gotten along at first on the helicarrier, sure. Things had been said, barbs thrown back and forth, but she’d figured they’d be able to move past that. Especially once they were outside the influence of Loki’s scepter. But… no dice. Steve was as distant to her as Howard ever was, and it surprised her just how much that still stung. He was polite to a capital T, but never anything more than that. It was always “Ms. Stark” this and “Ms. Stark” that, with little head nods and handshakes and holding doors open for her. It was infuriating to a point, and if it wasn’t the fact that when she was inside Iron Man he was a completely different person she wasn’t so sure she’d be able to take it.

 

Because Steve really was totally different when she was Iron Man. In one of the most confusing turn of events in her life, she’d consider Steve to be one of her absolute best friends. He spent a lot of time in the library when he first got to the tower, and she’d been too worried to approach him as herself. So, she suited up and joined him, under the pretense that the only chairs that could hold the armor at the time just happened to be in the library. Right beside him. And that one night turned into two. Three. Eight. A dozen. The library became the kitchen became the team’s shared living room became Steve’s floor’s living room became the diner around the block became… well, it just became a lot of things. She spent a lot of time with Steve as Iron Man on and off the battlefield, and shared things with him she would never talk about as herself. He did the same with her, and somewhere over the course of a few months they’d become good friends. She knew he still dreamed he was freezing in the ice sometimes (and now she could tell when his bad nights were and would try, as unobtrusively as possible, to sit nearer to him and turn the armor’s external heating on); he could tell when she was only awake because the void on the other side of the portal was haunting her dreams and would sit close enough for their shoulders to bump and turned the lights on while they talked. 

 

Everyone spoke to her as an equal when she was Iron Man, no matter the time of day. They invited  _ him _ to movie nights and dinners and all sorts of functions they put together to do as a team, but never once did Toni Stark attend. They’d tried inviting her a few times, but either she’d legitimately been busy, already told them she’d be there as Iron Man, or she just genuinely didn’t feel like trying to make sense of what they felt regarding her. It was easier to avoid how much they just put up with Toni Stark by sitting alone in the workshop for a few hours. And, six months later, it was basically a habit to avoid team functions as herself and go as Iron Man instead. Not that it made it any easier to continue to lie to them about her identity, especially as she grew to like them more and more, but… well, it was  _ working _ . And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? She’d had people tell her that a billion times before, so she figured she was due to follow that advice. 

 

Which, of course, made it very awkward during the annual kidnapping event. It wouldn’t have even been  _ that bad _ if not for the fact that she wasn’t the only one kidnapped this time. She wasn’t even the first target, which was oddly insulting. She’d been out to the SI branch in Tokyo, checking in on a few of the projects and just generally glad-handing a few people, when she got a call from Fury on her private line. That was out of character enough for her to excuse herself from the room, risking Pepper’s ire, to accept the call in a quiet hallway overlooking the street below. 

 

“You realize I’m busy?” She’d answered with instead of any proper greeting, figuring he’d appreciate skipping the formalities just as much as she would. 

 

“Stark, I know more about your schedule than you know about your schedule,” came the dry reply, and she had to hand it to him and mentally chalked a point up on a chalkboard under his name, “We need you back stateside. There’s a situation.” 

 

“When isn’t there?” she replied glibly, pulling the phone away from her ear and putting it on speaker so she could check out the newsfeeds. There was very little information other than headlines about something big going down in Manhattan. “I’m not seeing much here, Nick. What’s going on?” 

 

“Half your team just got taken in broad daylight at a café, of all damn places. Rogers, Barton, and Banner are all gone.” 

 

“Wha—,” she half uttered, feeling like she’d just been sucker punched, “How is that even possible? Did they surrender and go? No. They wouldn’t have done that. So tranqs then? Who has tranqs strong enough to take the Hulk down? ‘Cause we sure as shit don’t. What about Romanoff and Thor? Where are they? Send me the helicarrier coordinates and I’ll take a suit up there, we can regroup and—…” 

 

“Stark,” Nick cut her off mid-rant, effectively stopping the quick flow of words, “Where are you right now?” 

 

The question was so far from what she’d expected that it honestly caught her off guard, making her blink and looking around the empty hallway. “Uh. Tokyo? Hallway outside of one of the meeting rooms for the R&D department here?” 

 

“And the suit?” His tone was level, but she’d had enough experience keeping her own voice calm that she could hear the thin strain to it. 

 

She glanced back at the doors to the room she’d left, where Pepper still sat with the iconic red and gold suitcase that somehow no one ever thought twice about. “It’s… nearby. About thirty feet. Through a door. Beside Pepper.” 

 

“Get it.” 

 

That was a tone that brokered no arguing; it was urgent. It was an order, a command, and Toni found herself more than willing to follow it. It just figured that the one time she wanted to follow one of Fury’s orders like a good little soldier would be the one time that she would never get the chance. One second she was turning to rush back into the room, not too fast to freak out the employees inside and not too slow, and the next she was launched into the wall by the door as a forceful explosion blew out a both a window and a huge chunk of the wall it was connected to behind her. The impact had her head spinning and she was half sure that her shoulder was dislocated, but it didn’t stop her from trying to reach out to grab the phone that she’d lost her grip on. She could hear Fury on the line still through the speaker, asking for a status report, and she would’ve loved to give it except the moment her fingers barely scraped the edge of the phone a boot was landing harshly on her wrist. 

  
It was just a plain black combat boot, but she followed the leg it belonged to, up and up and up, inches upon inches of black combat gear, until her eyes finally landed on the shoulder pads. The emblem there stole her breath momentarily, her eyes widening and flicking between the dark mask that obscured the man’s features and back to it. “You’ve gotta be shitting me. HYDRA? Aren’t you guys supposed to be dead?” She  _ really _ hoped her voice was carrying over the chaos of sirens and screaming around her well enough for Nick to hear on the phone. Not that she got long to worry about that. A small pinching sensation down on her calf, followed by her vision becoming even  _ fuzzier _ like that was even possible, and her mind slowing down until she didn’t even have it in her to hold her head up anymore left her more concerned than whether Nick heard what she’d said or not. 


End file.
